A Few Friends

Because there was so much activity at home and so many places to play right there where I lived I didn't venture out to other kids' houses much. At a young age our world is still pretty small. I had school friends in Algona that I would visit from time to time as I got older though.

All the way down at the west end of 5th avenue was Steve Wakefield's house. He had a serious rope swing in his backyard that hung beneath a giant willow tree. The rope was one of those thick ones that was probably an inch in diameter. There was a small shed in his back yard way off to one side, and he would climb up onto the roof of that shed to launch from. That swing would arc you all the way across the entire back yard, and pretty high into the air too. I was only there a time or two and never got enough guts to do the rooftop swing like he did. Even his sister did it, which obviously impressed me greatly. He wasn't that good of a friend at the time, so I didn't go over there often enough to overcome my trepidation of climbing up on the shed for the rope swing.

There was a tomboyish girl named Cindy Hawthorne that I would visit a couple blocks north on Celery Street. Her mom would let us buy Popsicles when the ice cream truck went by. Those were good times.  I recall she also had some sort of a tree house too.  Let me tell you, it doesn't get much better than cute tomboys, tree houses, and ice cream trucks in the summer. Needless to say, I visited her as often as I could that summer.

Gale Mosher was the class "bad boy" when I was in school. He was the youngest of a big family (I think he had 6 siblings), and because his dad was bedridden with polio he could get away with practically anything. I envied him so much because of the stuff he got away with! He was always doing something that was cutting edge in those days, probably getting plenty of ideas and supplies from his older siblings. For example, dying a big blond splotch on the front of his hair--hair that was longer than everyone else's was at the time.  He also wore a metal name bracelet when nobody else did. He had all sorts of seemingly cool things going on. He was a rebel and I wished I could do some of the things he could do. It didn't really occur to me at the time how broken his home was, and he had a definite lack of discipline and structure. I heard that after we finished high school Gale lost his life trying to hop a freight train in Auburn.  I think he was 19.